02/02/2015

"The idea of wind chill indicates how cold it feels on the skin's surface as opposed to the actual temperature," explains Steve Cleaton, forecaster for BBC Weather. "Wind chill relates to a combination of three things - wind speed, moisture content or humidity and the air temperature. Conditions feel coldest on your skin when they are particularly windy and dry. This is because the moisture on our skin evaporates readily in dry air compared to moist air, causing evaporative cooling on the surface of the body. Our bodies work harder to maintain its core temperature, leading us to feel colder."

12/31/2014

The last part is unsurprsising--it literally means a Happy New Year, but what about the

guten Rutsch?

I have always taken it for granted that "ein guter Rutsch" refers to sliding ("rutschen"), as on snow and ice, into the new year - so what it seems to mean is "have a good slide into the new year.

But now I am being told that rosch is a Hebrew term meaning beginning or head. German jews used to wish each other "einen guten Rosch" - a good start into the new year, while those illiterate in Hebrew took the suggestive sound over into their language as a jolly way of wishing their fellows a Happy New Year.

12/21/2014

"Probable", "probably", "probability", "likely", "likelihood" - we use these terms all the time. But what exactly do we mean by them?

Personally, I agree with this position:

What is probability? Is it a property of a thing (e.g., a coin), a property of an event involving a thing (e.g., a toss of the coin), or a description of the average outcome of a large number of such events (e.g., “heads” and “tails” will come up about the same number of times)? I take the third view.

What does it mean to say, for example, that there’s a probability of 0.5 (50 percent) that a tossed coin will come up “heads” (H), and a probability of 0.5 that it will come up “tails” (T)? Does such a statement have any bearing on the outcome of a single toss of a coin? No, it doesn’t. The statement is only a short way of saying that in a sufficiently large number of tosses, approximately half will come up H and half will come up T. The result of each toss, however, is a random event — it has no probability.

In the ado of humankind, false concepts and the facile use of probability notions are of considerable currency. But why? Apparently, we have evolved to be good at ignoring uncertainty - in clever and viable ways. Innumerable cases show, our species manages to come up with reasonable solutions to the challenges of life even when information is too scarce to give us certainty. We make heroic assumptions to find orientation in a world that is too complex, detailed, and too arcane and concealed to ever be approached with complete certainty of its facts and nature. Yet, we survive, and even accomplish considerable progress. By systematically faking certainty. How do we do it?

2. Heuristics

In psychology, uncertainty was made famous by the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In their 1982 collection of research, “Judgments under Uncertainty,” the psychologists explained that when you don’t have enough information to make a clear judgment, or when you are making a decision concerning something too complex to fully grasp, instead of backing off and admitting your ignorance, you tend to instead push forward with confidence. The stasis of uncertainty never slows you down because human brains come equipped with anti-uncertainty mechanisms called heuristics.

In their original research they described how, while driving in a literal fog, it becomes difficult to judge the distance between your car and the other cars on the road. Landmarks, especially those deep in the mists, become more hazardous because they seem farther away than they actually are. This, they wrote, is because for your whole life you’ve noticed that things that are very far away appear a bit blurrier than things that are near. A lifetime of dealing with distance has reinforced a simple rule in your head: the closer an object the greater its clarity. This blurriness heuristic is almost always true, except underwater or on a foggy morning or on an especially clear day when it becomes incorrect in the other direction causing objects that are far away to seem much closer than normal.

Thus, with good grounds ...

Gerd Gigerenzer is a strong advocate of the idea that simple heuristics can make us smart. We don’t need complex models of the world to make good decisions.

The classic example is the gaze heuristic. Rather than solving a complex equation to catch a ball, which requires us to know the ball’s speed and trajectory and the effect of the wind, a catcher can simply run to keep the ball at a constant angle in the air, leading them to the point where it will land.

That’s what a [psychological] heuristic is, a simple rule that in the currency of mental processes trades accuracy for speed. A heuristic can lead to a bias, and your biases, though often correct and harmless, can be dangerous when in error, resulting in a wide variety of bad outcomes from foggy morning car crashes to unconscious prejudices in job interviews.

Part of our disposition to being biased in order to cope with uncertainty is what is called the halo effect whereby one transfers the (strongly felt, though potentially non-existent) authority of one data set to another data set, whose stand-alone authority is doubtful or unclear, as when a very negative personal experience with a redheaded person leads one to generalise the supposedly evil character of read-haired people - read more here.

I am interested in finding out more about the way in which this kind of heuristics colours our political perceptions and comportment. If it plays such an ubiquitous and important role in everyday life, it is likely to be of considerable weight regarding our political behaviour. These deliberations may be a first small step toward an anthropology of politics and freedom.

12/10/2014

Getting pulled over by the police is never a pleasant surprise, but this holiday season the police department in Lowell, Massachusetts decided to change that. A police officer was pulling over unsuspecting victims for minor traffic violations, and then would casually ask them what they or their kids wanted for Christmas. Meanwhile, he would secretly tell his team of "magic elves" that were hiding out at a nearby store and they would buy those gifts and run them over to him. The police officers felt it was important to take the time to show their citizens just how much they care, and you can see in the citizen's faces just how much it made their day.

11/26/2014

"Eins kommt zum Anderen" (literally "one comes to the other") - is a phrase suggesting (in the below context) that one bad thing is leading to another bad thing, as might happen when your boss gives you a dressing-down, which, in turn, puts you in a foul mood, so you say something stupid to your wife, who gets angry with you ...

The gentleman, Jürgen Klopp, is the coach of Germany's (normally at least) second best soccer team: Borussia Dortmund.

While performing brilliantly and dominating its qualifying group in the prestigious and highly lucrative European Champion's League, Borussia is miraculously unsuccessful in Germany's top soccer league: the Bundesliga. After a series of consecutive defeats, Borussia is now under enormous pressure in the national competition, when at the same time playing the best teams of Europe (like Arsenal London, tonight) still seems to Borussia like a walk in the park.

I like how "Kloppo" retains his sense of humour, laughing about himself as he realises his English is not getting him where he wants it to take him.

Later in the clip, "Kloppo" comments on Arsenal's last match in the English Premier League, when "the Gunners" were clearly better than Manchester United, yet lost 1:2 at the end of the day. While not occupying a relegation position in the national league, as Borussia Dortmund bizarrely does, Arsenal is not doing well in the English league either. However, advises "Kloppo", Arsenal are "strong, if you let zemm be strong [... so, not to let them be strong ...] zatt is our chopp:"

UPDATE

By the way, playing rather badly, Dortmund lost 0:2 to a consistently superior Arsenal.

As an afterthought concerning Thanksgiving: in the below video, we are witnessing a series of "mouth fouls" (playing the ball with your mouth/beak), and I am not even sure that there is a rule prohibiting the use of your mouth in soccer. So, is carrying the ball with your teeth/beak a special case of a header? A Texas Turkey header?